Dogcoin's popularity: Why is a "altcoin" being chased and bought?

ELON 2025-10-1 04:14 65388人围观 DOGE

*This article is the original content of "Sanlian Life Weekly". In 2013, the two founders created Dogecoin in order to satirize the speculative atmosphere in the Bitcoin circle and accompanied it with exaggerated and joking Doge dog head emoticons. But no

*This article is original content from "Sanlian Life Weekly"

In 2013, the two founders created Dogecoin to satirize the speculative atmosphere in the Bitcoin circle, and accompanied it with an exaggerated and playful Doge dog head emoticon. But now this coin has become the most popular currency for speculators and has become synonymous with speculation fanaticism.

Intern reporter｜Lu Ya

On April 1, 2021, Tesla CEO Musk posted on Twitter that "SpaceX will send a Dogecoin to the moon." Before everyone could figure out whether Musk was making a joke on April Fools' Day, Dogecoin had risen sharply in the following hour, with an increase of up to 27%.

Elon Musk's Twitter screenshot

On April 16, after Musk released another picture of "dog barking at the moon", Dogecoin's intraday increase once exceeded 200%. After that, it continued to soar five times in just four or five days. As of 4:30 pm Beijing time on April 25, although the price trend of Dogecoin has shown a downward trend, it has still increased by more than 230 times compared with the low of 0.001158 in 2020.

Accidentally popular

Dogecoin was born in 2013 and its main founders are Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer and software engineer Billy Markus. In the currency circle, Dogecoin was originally one of many "altcoins". “Many of the so-called altcoins are to change the source code of Bitcoin and then list on the exchange, which becomes a new virtual currency. ”Bitcoin miner Chen Xiaochang told this magazine.

However, unlike the main creative teams of other virtual currencies, the original intention of Dogecoin to create Dogecoin was to mock the speculative behavior of the virtual currency circle. Palmer himself posted on Twitter at the time that "its existence is not very serious."

Dogecoin in its early days was not sought after in the market, with almost no more than a cent, and more it appeared in the digital cryptocurrency field as a "tip". Chen Xiaochang told this magazine that when he started mining in 2017, the mining pool where he was mining bitcoin was always given tens of thousands of Dogecoins for free. “As far as I know, until the beginning of this year, there were still many mining pools that were delivered to thousands of places. Except for the rise in Bitcoin in 2018, few people in the currency circle really take it seriously. Just this year, since Musk posted several tweets and the big players below took the opportunity, it suddenly surged, which was indeed a bit unexpected. ”

Picture｜People's Vision

In fact, there are not a few "air coins" or "altcoins" like Dogecoin. Dogecoin’s ability to stand out and gain the favor of retail investors is closely related to its background.

In 2013, when Dogecoin was born, the "Doge Meme" was popular in the Internet world in the United States. Doge was originally a name for dogs in an online animation series called Homestar Runner. Finally, it was linked to a silly and cute Shiba Inu with sharp eyes, and was matched with various funny inner monologues, and became popular in mainstream online communities such as Reddit in emoticons.

Palmer and Marcus borrowed the Doge name directly from the digital currency they created, making this new currency a part of the Doge emoticon trend, arousing the interest of Reddit users, and Dogecoin has gained a lot of attention. As Palmer said on Twitter at the time, "almost everyone who uses Reddit has Dogecoin." In addition, in the early days of the establishment of Dogecoin, Palmer and Marcus hoped to use it to create some charitable power and would launch activities similar to "raise money for Jamaican sled teams" and "build wells for rural Kenya" in Dogecoin's online community. These charitable activities also increased their exposure outside the currency circle.
It is precisely because Dogecoin is more "out of the circle" and more familiar to investors outside the digital cryptocurrency circle. In addition, its founding time was earlier, even earlier than Ethereum, another mainstream currency in the virtual currency field, which has led to Dogecoin gaining higher public awareness among a number of air coins, and it is easier for people to develop FOMO (Fear of missing out, which can be translated as "fear of missing").
According to Ji Canghai, a researcher at the think tank of Harvard University's Belfer Center and co-founder of Manta Network, an important part of the successful driving of retail investors and hype of coins is to take advantage of the public's FOMO effect. Simply put, in the context of Bitcoin continuing to rise and the market becoming crazy, many people are afraid of missing out on opportunities and want to participate.

“Under this irrational mentality, many people have not seen that from a technical perspective, the market has no point to increase its value. They only care that Bitcoin has increased tenfold and I have not caught up. Then I also want to buy something similar that may increase tenfold, and I will not consider whether it really has a value that can increase tenfold. ”

At this time, Dogecoin, which is highly recognizable and has a certain community consensus under the years of large investors, has become the best choice for investors who have missed the big rise in Bitcoin. A large number of coin holders have the opportunity to speculate on Dogecoin.

Picture｜Visual China

As Chen Xiaochang said, "Although we do not think that Dogecoin itself has any technical content or actual value, at least everyone knows it, and even people outside the circle who do not understand coins at all have heard of it. This alone is enough to drive retail investors. Later, the similar Dogecoin, Fuyuancoin, or some coins that make people unable to remember their names were the same. Although the nature was the same, no one knew it at all, so it was difficult to speculate. ”
The second Bitcoin?

As Dogecoin continues to rise in popularity, many people even began to speculate whether it will become the "second Bitcoin".

Judging from the past trends of Dogecoin, it does have a strong correlation with Bitcoin. Its past four major ups and downs are closely related to the Bitcoin market.

Its first rise began in 2017, a year when the Bitcoin market was in high popularity. During the process of Bitcoin's continuous rise from January to May, Dogecoin's price also began to soar, reaching a peak of US$0.0042 on May 21, but then quickly followed Bitcoin's decline, with a decline of 75% in two weeks. The second time was on January 7, 2018, following the momentum of Bitcoin breaking through $19,783 in the previous year, Dogecoin also broke through $0.02. In April of the same year, before the entire currency market fell to its low point, Bitcoin had a market rebound. At the same time, Dogecoin's price also experienced a brief pullback after a sharp drop, rising from US$0.0020 to US$0.0041.

Dogecoin’s only rise that was not related to Bitcoin’s trend occurred in September 2019, when Ethereum conducted a test to build a blockchain bridge with Dogecoin. This systematic test inspired the virtual currency community to support Dogecoin, causing its price to rise by 173% in two days.

But even if it is closely related to the rise and fall of Bitcoin, the value of Dogecoin is still incomparable to most mainstream digital currencies in these four rises and falls. Not only that, whether in terms of issuance concept or later industrial support, Dogecoin is not comparable to most mainstream currencies that are widely recognized today.

Technically, Ji Canghai believes that the value contained in Dogecoin is not even as valuable as some currencies that have truly done innovative research and development in protocols or technology. “At least those currencies are innovative and are likely to make substantial contributions to the new financial system that will emerge in the future, such as being able to open up different data links. ”However, Dogecoin's design has no innovation at all. Its underlying technology comes entirely from imitating and copying the source code of Bitcoin, and no innovation is added to the construction of the protocol. “In this field, only innovation is valuable. ”

Moreover, since its inception, it has appeared in the form of "a joke". In theory, its issuance is unlimited, and once the currency can be issued indefinitely, it does not really have monetary attributes, which is completely different from the basic concepts of other digital currencies. On the other hand, except for the 128.7 billion coins distributed by the founding team at the beginning, no new Dogecoin continued to be generated, because no one has ever updated and maintained the Dogecoin network system.

This means that Dogecoin has become a completely "air coin". It only has the concept of digital currency, but it is actually just a speculative tool that is diverted from the hands of various speculators.
Other mainstream digital currency industries including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum have basically formed a huge and relatively mature industrial chain, with mining machine manufacturers, miners, mining pools, and power supply sites. This ensures that these digital currencies have huge and stable system maintenance capabilities. Although they have been experiencing price fluctuations, it is actually difficult for the financial system represented by legal tender to actually collapse and zero technically. Dogecoin does not have this foundation.
After the carnival

Even so, as Dogecoin prices continue to soar, many holders have begun to expect it to become a trading currency with a large-scale circulation value. Recently, a petition "Please accept Dogecoin as a payment method" appeared on the popular overseas petition website Change.org. The petition has been signed by 1:30 pm on April 25, Beijing time.

However, this massive petition event is very likely to end in failure. Although since March this year, companies such as Newegg, resort company Kessler Collection, and Canadian Internet service provider easyDNS have announced that they have accepted Dogecoin as a payment method. The NBA Dallas Mavericks also allow fans to use Dogecoin to buy tickets and surrounding areas, but this does not mean that Dogecoin will be a widely recognized currency and has wide circulation value.

Ji Canghai believes that the application scenarios of Dogecoin are very limited, because most merchants cannot use Dogecoin, a currency with such an exaggerated rise and fall as the unit standard. “Take buying a house as an example. If you use Dogecoin to buy a house, the currency will fall by 90% in the end, how is it possible? Then the entire market will be in chaos. ”

As for the banner of accepting Dogecoin payments by merchants, it is very likely to be "rigging for themselves" and attracting potential customers in this way, because after all, many well-known people hold Dogecoin in large quantities. However, once Dogecoin falls too much, they are likely to close such transaction channels. The most distinctive example is that in 2018, the prices of various virtual currencies plummeted, and many merchants who had accepted Bitcoin payments shut down this transaction method.

“As for why Musk is praising Dogecoin, I don’t think he is taking the opportunity to make a profit after hype. If I guess his motivation, I think it is more likely that, on the one hand, he does not like being regulated, so he favors the decentralized crypto culture and expresses it in a playful way - after all, the pattern on Dogecoin is also a representative of American emoticon culture ； On the other hand, he may have a playful mentality and want to treat this as a social experiment to see if his support for Dogecoin can create a FOMO effect. If it can really cause a huge reaction, he can still gain a lot of sense of accomplishment from it. ” Ji Canghai speculated so.

Facts have proved that it was with Musk's "Supreme Dogecoin" Twitter as an opportunity that many eager coin holders began to speculate Dogecoin with the mentality of making money, and led a large number of retail investors who believed in the "money circle myth" and fell into the FOMO mentality because of witnessing the big rise in Bitcoin, and had a carnival.

Regarding the future of Dogecoin, Ji Canghai and Liu Rui both expressed difficulty in predicting it, believing that it depends largely on a common retail investor psychology. “When there are more people who are irrational, it has become a common phenomenon, and irrationality may really become 'rational'. ”

In fact, if the fanaticism about Dogecoin really gradually becomes a deep-rooted social consensus, it is difficult to assert whether it will really have a certain minimum value at the public psychological level in the future. Once it falls to a certain low point, there will always be someone taking over. Otherwise, a complete collapse would not be impossible.

Let time go back to 2013. The two founders at that time created Dogecoin to satirize the speculative atmosphere in the Bitcoin circle and accompanied it with exaggerated and joking Doge dog head emoticons. But now this coin has become the most popular currency for speculators and has become synonymous with speculation fanaticism.

(Chen Xiaochang and Liu Rui mentioned in the article are both pseudonyms)

END Author of this article: Lu Ya WeChat layout: Xiaofeng

WeChat review: LL

This article is original content and the copyright belongs to "Sanlian Life Weekly". Welcome to share, like, and watch the three consecutive games at the end of the article! Please contact the backend to reprint.